MANDA
"Let Him Pitch!"
284
Luckless the Contestant if He "Pulls Leather"
Out of the corral gate at Mandan rodeo rockets a leaping demon topped by a daring buckaroo. The rider
must stay with his mount for 10 spine-jarring seconds to remain in competition. Horses used in North Dakota
shows are not trained buckers but wild mustangs straight from the ranges.
a setting the height of the capitol is accen
tuated (page 293).
"Some people criticize us for building a sky
scraper statehouse on the prairie," Russell
Reid, superintendent of the State Historical
Museum, told me, "but nobody can say the
taxpayers didn't get their money's worth in
the construction. Fire destroyed the old capi
tol in 1930, and the new one went up in the
depths of the depression when prices for every
thing were down. The architects scoured the
country for ideas and gave us an edifice with
interior space 80 percent usable-one of the
most efficient public buildings in the United
States-for a total cost of only $2,000,000."
Mr. Reid has in the museum a fine collection
of Indian relics. Many decades before Pierre
de la V6rendrye-first white man to set foot
on the territory that is now North Dakota
came up the Missouri in 1738, industrious
Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras were tilling
the soil there and raising good crops.*
The warlike, nomadic Sioux who ranged
around the Turtle Mountains, westward into
Montana and south into South Dakota, were
bitter enemies of the farmer folk.
Today, most of the agricultural Indians live
* See "Indians of Our Western Plains," by Matthew
W. Stirling, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE, July,
1944.